The core of life coaching, to me, has always been about providing motivation, encouragement, guidance, and loving accountability to achieve the set of goals a person, group, organization, or community has set for itself.
People may feel or observe that pain, hurt, trauma, dis-ease, chaos, disfunction, or unfulfillment in their life might be acute in one area—career/work environment, school, friendship(s), romantic relationship(s), family life, physical and emotional health, spirituality, etc.—or becoming serious throughout.
Thus, healing, in the context of coaching, is about utilizing these activities—motivation, encouragement, guidance, and loving accountability—and their associated techniques and tools to help individuals/groups achieve some sense of wholeness or completeness in all or some area of their lives.
Coaching should always be a space and process where one feels listened to, affirmed, supported, and when necessary and appropriate challenged. By challenge, I do not mean through aggression, confrontation, or judgment, but the provision of information and guidance delivered through honesty, sincerity, wisdom, and experience.
Lastly, healing in the context of coaching is about identifying the needed mental, emotional, physical, and (even) spiritual shifts that will help folks reach individual and collective wholeness, and then devise a plan or process to create the structures that will enable and bring about these shifts.
Important Note: Coaching can be an effective mode of healing for addressing general forms of hurt, harm, and pain and might very well be experienced as very therapeutic, and in fact, help address issues stemming from various kinds of trauma and illnesses, but coaching is not therapy. Coaching is not an appropriate venue for addressing clinical depression and anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive and compulsive behavior, or any diagnosable personality or mood disorders. Coaching might work well in consort with talk therapy and/or psychiatric treatment, but it should never be seen or understood as a replacement for either.